Department Blog
Zachary Dezman, MD, MS, MS, was a guest on today's morning news broadcast from Fox45, discussing the surprising results of a study designed to identify drugs used by ED patients being treated for overdose. You can watch the full segment here:
https://foxbaltimore.com/morning/synthetic-drug-testing
Marijuana was the individual drug most commonly detected. Only one sample tested positive for a synthetic cannabinoid. The results suggest that street drugs are being packaged in new combinations not detected by standard ED tests. The investigators also found that the drugs patients claimed to have taken (and the drugs the physicians assumed they had taken) often did not match the metabolites detected by the analysis.
The study and its findings are more fully described at this site: